Transcript

So a couple things. One, TechCrunch just got sold to a group company called Regent that dropped out of the sky. No one saw that coming. Wow. Did they sell in Gadget as well? I do not know. We only know about region, but we also know that Regent bought Foundry last week, which was like PC Mag and so forth. So something that came to a roll up here. This happened literally right before we jumped on. I have a bunch of texts from our colleagues that I need to go read Jason. But I think people who listen to the show and watch it probably are TechCrunch readers as well, so they might care that it's being sold. Details to come. Probably not a great sign, Jason, you've, you've done more media M&A than I've done. It's an investment firm, Regent, you know, Tech Ridge probably makes 2030 million a year because of the events. But it's kind of, I don't want to be rude here, but without a like a top leader in it, it's, it's waned. There's no Alex there, there's no Michael Arrington, there's no Jason Calacanis, there's no Peter Rojas. You don't order to have these. You need to have like a person who actually runs it. Oh, and Yahoo retained ownership to Engadget. So that was the one I sold them. So it sounds like they wanted tech crunch. I don't know who region is. I actually had told Jim Lanzone if you ever wanted to sell tech Crunch to let me know or Engadget, I would buy them. So shout out to shout out to my friend Land Zone for not calling me. Thanks, Jim. But it looks like Regent owns PC World, Macworld and Tech Advisor. So this is going to join a suite of tech news sites that they already have. And I'm sure they're willing to invest and double down and bring the brand back to its former glory. I'm sure that's the plan. Yeah, like all these things, it's probably an SEO play. I'm guessing it's a fire sale and SEO plan. They're gonna cut 2/3 of the riders and game over. And actually, if they own PC World map, World Info World CEO, Tech Advisor, all those other publications I'm reading here that they own, they're gonna play it straight and TechCrunch become quite lefty, dare I say. I think you might agree. And it started to dip into the sort of like holding truth to power, anti tech kind of space Alex, I think, which made it not popular amongst my crowd. The VC's and the CEO's haven't exactly liked TechCrunch is kind of woke position over the last. What do you think, Alex on adversarial. You can have an opinion. No, I I I mean, I'm this is one of those times I'm so conflicted. It's hard to it's hard to be clear headed. I mean, I love so many people that we like to Yeah, we this is like this is where you could actually, you know, earn your bones here. Just let it RIP, OK. I think the people complain that the media isn't sufficiently nice to tech are bunch of whiners and they should go sit upon their Thrones of gold and stop convention about people who make one one thousandth of their income. Also like. Keep in mind how the market is set up. I mean, there is more people working in PR just in San Francisco for tech companies then TechCrunch has ever had ever worked for it period, historically added together. And I think, I think to make TechCrunch better, what you should do is you should quadruple the staff, not not cut it by 2/3. I, I think if this ends up being the fire sale SEO play you're describing, Jason, it'll be an enormous loss. And also I feel sorry for all the MLM companies because as media continues to get gutted, there's going to be less and less. Enough for them to ingest. So this is bad personally, bad I think for the industry and bad I would say for the future as well. Doesn't make me happy. Maybe I'm wrong, I would love to be wrong. All these brands now are just like SEO, you know, click fodder, like you know, all the old Gawker brands, etcetera. They just get bought for pennies on the dollar. People just extract all their money out of them. They don't invest in them. The people who write for them could be in a foreign country, just writing like, you know, regurgitated articles. The only people really. You know the the future of the industry is subscriptions and sub stacks, Beehive ghosts, all those platforms we use Beehive, a partner of ours, really great platform if you don't want to have to pay the 10% vig. You just want to pay like a soft food product supposed to giving all your revenue over the information. I think New York Times, the subscription based model is clearly the only sustainable one. Now once you start trying to get advertising going with the exceptional podcasts or written words, you know for written words it. Doesn't work anymore. The reason it works for podcast is because I read the ads when I read the ads, and we have a very niche audience. You know, if you're spending $30,000 on five ads or $60,000 on 10 ads, whatever, you buy some ads on a podcast. If you're a SAS company and you get 1 customer, it paid for itself. That's like a little niche thing over here. Then the other piece of it is your Bill Simmons. You have a massive audience and you talk about Michelob or Bud Light. I don't know which one he does, but you know, whichever beer he does like, you reach the masses. So yeah. It's going to be a messy middle for people like TechCrunch. I don't think this will be the last publication we see subscription and they didn't commit. Man, that, that's a long story, but they're not a single problem. But part partially, we were hamstrung by what you might call a big company politics and a bias towards internal tooling that was already owned. But we, I mean, speaking very generically to protect other people's work. But like, we got it into the seven figures. I was proud of that. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. And it would have gotten to 8 figures if they just Simply put everything behind a paywall. And it would be an independent, strong brand. They should have said, you know what? Nothing for free anymore. Anybody who's a subscriber can share with free free stories a day if you happen to get it that way. Great. And you have to commit. That's it, you know, and I tried and then, well, actually it's funny that you bring that up because when that project that I worked on Tech Plus was ended, kind of shot out from underneath me, that's when you called back and we're like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. And then now I'm here. So thank you Yahoo and Region for putting me on Twist, apparently. There you go. Better deal. I gave you a better deal. Founders, let's be real, binding great developers is hard. 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